The release of VENONA translations involved careful consideration of the
privacy interests of individuals mentioned, referenced, or identified in the
translations. Some names have not been released when to do so would
constitute an invasion of privacy.

Introduction

In February 1943 the U.S. Army's signal intelligence
organization, often called "Arlington Hall" after the location of its
headquarters in Virginia, began a secret program to examine
encrypted Soviet diplomatic telegrams between Moscow and Soviet
missions abroad. Not until 1946, however, after difficult analytic
work, did Arlington Hall begin to recognize that these so-called
diplomatic communications contained thousands of messages of the
KGB (the Soviet espionage agency), the GRU (the Red Army's
general staff intelligence directorate), and the Naval GRU. This
project was eventually named "VENONA."

Five public releases of VENONA translations and related
documents have already been made. These releases covered the
following topics:

Soviet atomic bomb espionage

New York KGB messages of 1942 and 1943

New York and Washington KGB messages of 1944 and
1945

San Francisco and Mexico City KGB messages; GRU
New York and Washington messages; Washington Naval GRU
messages

KGB and GRU messages from Europe, South America,
and Australia

This monograph accompanies the sixth release of VENONA
translations and related documents to the public and includes the
translations of KGB messages inadvertently left out of the previous
five. It also updates some translations by restoring names that had
been protected for privacy reasons in the original releases. Other
VENONA documents of historical interest are also being released.

This material can be reviewed at the National Cryptologic Museum
library and will be publicly available on the World Wide Web
(http:Hwww.nsa.gov); additional paper copies of this material will be
given to various archives (e.g., Library of Congress, state
universities).

Translations

Twenty-four new KGB message translations, discovered in
reconciling the historic collection, are included in this release. Of
particular note are messages describing the activities of Jack and
Dr. Robert Soble, veteran KGB agents operating in the U.S. and
elsewhere.1 These include arrangements for a cover business for
Jack Soble; movement of money between Canada and the U.S.; and
the reactivation by the KGB of the correspondent and Hollywood
producer Stephen Laird. 2 There are reports from and about the well-
placed KGB agents PLUMB, RAIDER, and FRENK (previously identified
as Charles Kramer, Victor Perlo, and Laurence Duggan,
respectively). Also of interest is a long and complicated message
about affairs in Hungary, which is based on a secret report that had
been lost in a taxicab in New York City and obtained by the KGB.3

Several dozen other translations, previously released, are
now being made available in more complete form (see, for example,
the Stockholm GRU and Naval GRU translations). This material,
concerning Soviet espionage in the U.S., is grouped in the same
order as in the previous releases. More complete versions of the first
release may shed additional light on KGB espionage in Chicago
against the atomic bomb project (e.g., that covername FLOX was Rose
Olson) and on other KGB operations in New York, Washington, and
San Francisco.

KGB Organization During World War II

Almost all of the VENONA KGB messages are between
Lieutenant General Fitin, the head of the KGB's First Chief
Directorate (FCD) and his "Rezidents" (Station Chiefs) abroad. FCD
was the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB responsible for
espionage and counterintelligence outside the Soviet Union.
However, in terms of personnel, it was a very small part of the KGB
then and later. Far larger were the KGB's Second Chief Directorate,
which handled internal counterintelligence and security (this and
related departments were the true secret police of the Soviet Union),
and SMERSH ("Death to Spies"), which was responsible for military
counterintelligence. The KGB had large formations of police troops,
prison camp guards, and a small army protecting Stalin and the
Soviet leadership. During 1943-45, Arlington Hall and the U.S.
Navy's signal intelligence organization also collected a small
amount of police and SMERSH radio traffic.

Meredith Gardner's Special Reports

The Army Security Agency (ASA) recruited dozens of
language teachers and professors from across the United States after
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of them was Meredith
Gardner, a language instructor at the University of Akron who
spoke numerous languages. At ASA his work on the Japanese and
German "problems" during World War II met with great acclaim.
As the war ended, Gardner joined the VENONA effort and spent the
next twenty-seven years on the project. As the principal translator
and analyst on the VENONA program, he wrote a series of eleven
Special Reports during 1947-48, The first of these was released at
the VENONA Conference in October 1996 and is included in this set.
The remaining reports are now being released and should help date
some of the earliest work on important VENONA cases such as
covername LIBERAL/ANTENNA (eventually identified as Julius
Rosenberg) and LIBERAL's wife Ethel.

Mr. Gardner wrote these Special Reports to record what he
was finding in the VENONA messages and to alert his chain of
command and G-2's counterintelligence group. When Robert
Lamphere of FBI headquarters became involved in VENONA full
time, Mr. Gardner began to issue individual message translations,
and the Special Report series was discontinued.

Following is a list of these Special Reports. Some are not
dated, but all were issued between 30 August 1947 and 12 August
1948.

Gardner's initial overview of the covernames he was
finding in the VENONA messages.

Mention of covernames GOMER/ HOMER and YUN,
later identified as Donald Maclean and Stephen Laird.

KGB Canberra

ENORMOZ (atomic bomb) espionage including the
work of covername LIBERAL

Confirmation that the VENONA messages were KGB

LIBERAL's network

The KOMAR affair. (KOMAR was Kravchenko, who
defected from the Soviet trade mission in Washington and was being
hunted by the KGB.)

Messages changing covernames

Covername KARAS (Ivan Subasic, KGB agent
involved in Serbo-Croatian matters in the U.S. and abroad)

An interesting example of the type of material found in the
reports would be in Special Report #6, 28 April 1948, which
summarizes or gives the text of a significant number of
LIBERAUANTENNA translations. See, for example, message number
1053, 26 July 1944, New York KGB to Moscow Center (paragraph 6)
that concerns ANTENNA's proposal to recruit his friend Max Elitcher,
who was a Communist, as were all members of the Rosenberg
espionage ring. The translation of New York to Moscow No. 628, 5
May 1944 (paragraph 4), is important to the story of the
development of the Rosenberg case. As of April 1948, the Arlington
Hall VENONA unit had not been able to decrypt the first twenty-four
groups of that message. Lacking this critical context, Mr. Gardner
translated the message as giving a description of ANTENNA. When
those missing twenty-four groups were decrypted - see the reissue of
the translation 27 June 1950 (also included in this release) - it was
shown that the message was in fact about Rosenberg's description of
his friend Al Sarant, whom he recruited for the KGB.

One of the Special Reports issued in July 1948 (1948 was a
presidential election year) gives the earliest translation found of the
KGB message concerning bribery of persons around David Niles, an
important advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman (New York
to Moscow message 786, 1 June 1944).

Other Documents

Related to the Gardner Special Reports is the covername
book used by Arlington Hall and later by NSA analysts, to record the
KGB message covernames, every appearance of them by message
number and date, and the identities of the covernamed persons
where known. This covername book contains terms used in KGB
New York, Washington, and San Francisco communications and
messages to those stations from Moscow Center. The dates of entries
made in the covername book are unclear, but it was developed and
used from early 1949 until the VENONA program ended in 1980.

Two additional Meredith Gardner documents complete this
release. One is his short account of the development of the
GOMEWHOMER case (Donald Maclean) from the Arlington Hall point
of view. This account must not be taken as a full representation of
the counterintelligence investigation chronology, however. In the
second document, short but undated, Mr. Gardner recorded some
dates concerning who had access to VENONA information in the early
days. This is also a valuable part of the historical record.

The Shutdown of the VENONA Program

NSA is often asked why the VENONA program ran so long
(1943-1980), given the fixed set of material that was being worked.
The answer is that NSA's customers - FBI, CIA, and the appropriate
U.K. and Allied services - asked that the program be continued as
investigative leads were still being run and there was the hope that
unidentified covernames could be identified. In 1977, William P.
Crowell, then the acting chief of the NSA division that housed the
remaining VENONA group,4 decided that the program should end in
about two years. The group working on VENONA surveyed customers
and evaluated the likelihood of finding further "matches" in the
traffic (see earlier monographs for discussion of the cryptanalytic
process). In 1978 NSA decided to end the program by 1 October 1980.

In September 1978 David Blee, head of the CIA
Counterintelligence Staff, invited NSA, FBI, and Allied
representatives to form a committee to evaluate the potential for the
VENONA effort during the next two years. Howard W. (Bill) Kulp
and Mildred Hayes, heads of the VENONA unit in the later years,
represented NSA.

During the last phase of VENONA (1978-80), NSA issued
thirty-nine first-time translations of KGB and GRU messages and
reissued eight other translations. Some of these first-time
translations were quite significant, though mainly for
counterintelligence research purposes. In January 1980, Bill Kulp
prepared a final technical and counterintelligence evaluation of the
VENONA program and its prospects. The report concluded that the
program should end as scheduled because of the age of the material
being worked, the difficulty in conducting investigations and
locating collateral material, and the fact that the most important
material had been exhaustively analyzed. Nonetheless, NSA
analysts Mildred Hayes, Angela Nanni, and Janice Cram continued
their cryptanalytic work right up to the end of the project.

Postscript

The British Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), NSA's counterpart, has just released to the Public Record
Office the MASK message traffic - thousands of secret COMINTERN
messages between various capital cities and Moscow during the
period 1934-37 which give a wealth of detail about Moscow's control
of the various national Communist parties (including the American
Communist Party). The National Cryptologic Museum library holds
a complete set of the MASK messages.

Prepared by Robert Louis Benson
September 1997

Notes

New York to Moscow, 24 June 1943,6 July 1943, 5 May 1944,26 October 1944

12 and 23 August 1944

Message # 1669ff, New York-Moscow, 29-30 November 1944

William Crowell was deputy director of NSA from February 1994 to September
1997.